Phantom gets a cash injection as its scandal-plagued chairman resigns. Will we …

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We've documented at great length the ways that Phantom Entertainment (formerly Infinium Labs) has used and abused both cash and deadlines over the last five years, clinging to life by issuing ever-greater amounts of stock and by not paying bills. Apparently, years of this behavior make Phantom an "attractive investment"—the company has just secured a $1.3 million loan from European investors. The vaunted Phantom Wireless Lapboard isn't (quite) dead yet.

The new funding announcement came only a day after the company's chairman, Tim Roberts, resigned. Roberts claimed that he now has "an exciting new opportunity that requires my full attention so it's time to move on." Not surprisingly, no mention was made of the fact that he is in big trouble with the SEC over an alleged "fax blast" pump-and-dump scheme centered on Phantom stock.

The move means that Phantom is down to only a couple of employees, but the company insists that it can still market its wireless lapboard (a keyboard/mouse combination device that was once supposed to be the interface to the company's new gaming console). Phantom has no actual product yet, but it has managed to sign licensing agreements with Ione and Alienware. Assuming that it can actually begin production of the devices, Phantom should already have outlets for some of them. The company has also taken pre-orders on its site for some time, though there's no indication of how many orders they've chalked up.

The lapboard

Linley Management SA coughed up the cash to keep the company afloat, calling it "an attractive investment for digital media investors." Linley also noted that the deals with Alienware and Ione played a major role in their decision to loan the money.

According to SEC documents seen by Ars Technica, the deal went down on July 2 as Linley agreed to provide €1 million to Phantom at an annual interest rate of 10 percent. How did Phantom secure the loan? Actual cash and assets are basically out of the question at this point, so the company pledged to issue 333,333,333 shares of its stock (worth about $200,000), with another 1.8 billion shares to follow by August 31 of this year.

Although Phantom's press releases refers to Linley as a European company, a closer look at SEC documents shows that they are headquartered in the British Virgin Islands and that a Virgin Islands court will have competency over any legal questions that arise from the deal. A web search for Linley Management turned up no hits apart from news of the Phantom deal, and the press releases issued by Phantom don't provide any contact information for Linley, not even the name of their spokesperson. The SEC docs show that the deal was signed by one Jacques Mathieu, though no details on him are available, either.

In another odd bit of news, a look at the actual agreement signed between the two parties shows that Phantom has opened a new European branch of its own in Windhof, Luxembourg—odd for a company that has defaulted on the rent payments for its US headquarters, but perhaps it's a sign that the company is serious about selling in Europe.

Greg Koler, Phantom's CEO, now says that Phantom will "launch marketing and sales in the fourth quarter of this year." One would hope that after burning through more than $73 million at least some actual product would result, but we'll believe it when we see it.